DETAILS

When the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra takes the stage at Copley Symphony Hall on Thursday, it will do so as part of a 12-city North American tour in celebration of a remarkable occasion: its 130th anniversary.

To put that in perspective: The Shanghai Symphony is decades older than the San Diego Symphony (founded in 1910 as the San Diego Civic Orchestra), the San Francisco Symphony (founded 1911) and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (founded 1919), yet it hails from a nation with its own rich indigenous musical tradition in which Western orchestral music is an alien import.

“The 130 years of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra is different from that of American and European orchestras,” explained the orchestra’s general manager, Chen Guangxian.

The orchestra was founded by European colonialists as a public band in 1879 and — much like the San Diego Symphony in its early years — played a summer schedule in waterfront parks. But its musicians were all recruited from the Philippines and Europe, and its audience was exclusively foreign, since Chinese were not allowed into either the parks where it gave summer concerts or the Town Hall where it retreated in winter.

World War I saw the near disbandment of the orchestra (like the San Diego Symphony during the war) but salvation came in 1919 when the charismatic Italian pianist and conductor Mario Paci sailed into port with his Steinway grand piano in tow.

Paci, a multilingual ladies man and a gambler, intended to give one recital and sail on, but he fell in love with Shanghai and willingly agreed when asked to assume the helm at the orchestra.

During more than two decades as conductor, Paci integrated the orchestra — the first Chinese to play with it was the violinist Tan Shuzhen, in 1927 — performed works by the first generation of Chinese orchestral composers, and invited Chinese musicians to perform as soloists.

The Shanghai Symphony soon gained a reputation as “the best orchestra in the Far East” and drew world-class musicians including Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz and Fyodor Chaliapin. But then came a series of crises.

“We went through war, political struggle and the Cultural Revolution,” explained Chen, the manager.

The Japanese took over the orchestra during World War II and when the Communist Party came to power in 1949, the SSO was preserved only after a heated national debate as to whether orchestral music could serve the needs of “workers, peasants, and soldiers.” The symphony’s foreign members were forced to leave, but this enabled its Chinese musicians to step forward under the baton of Huang Yijun — until the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966 and they all came under attack for playing “bourgeois” Western music.

Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong, worked with composers to create eight “model operas” that became virtually the only theatrical pieces staged in all of China. Their melodies were reorchestrated as “revolutionary symphonies,” and for 10 years the Shanghai Symphony played two of these — “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy” and “Shajiabnang” — over and over, sometimes while attired in military uniforms.